Is anyone honestly opposed to having students govern and own their own private data? Are reputable organizations openly, actively working around systems to get hold of individual students’ data?

Yes. There are so many that it’s overwhelming to learn. The biggest organizations that you can think of, both political and corporate, are either looking away from scary privacy issues, or are actively engaged in promoting the end of student data privacy for reasons either research-based or greed-based (or both).

Trendy, probably well-meaning power brokers profit hugely from data sharing –done without the informed consent of students and parents. Most of them probably aren’t thinking through what they are doing, nor of its effects on individual freedom. Many of the richest and most powerful of them (even Betsy DeVos herself) were here in Salt Lake City last week at the Global Silicon Valley convention; attendance there cost $2,795 per person, which is a clue to how exclusionary the conspiracy of greed really is and how it fears pushback from teachers and parents and lovers of liberty. That is a conspiracy of greed against local control.

I am not fighting greed. I believe in capitalism even with its greedy warts, because capitalism represents freedom.

It’s piracy that I balk at. And the student data-mining madness is absolute piracy. Parents, students and teachers were never asked for consent prior to having their data mined by the schools or the schools’ agents. In some cases, that data is already being held against them.

How can this be happening? Is it really happening? Can we comprehend it?

To make it simple, look at this notification of inspection. It seems snoopy, yet reasonable. I found it in my suitcase when I came home recently from San Francisco.

Think about it.

Did you as a student, a parent, or a teacher, ever receive a “NOTICE OF INSPECTION”?

No! Of course not. You are being given less respect than a suitcase. Children are being scrutinized for academic, social and psychological data, their data saved in State Longitudinal Database Systems and in third party corporate data systems, without informed consent and without notice. That is snoopy –and unreasonable.

“Partnershipping” education-data piracy is happening rampantly. It includes all the states who took the federal bribe and then created a student stalking system known as the State Longitudinal Database System (SLDS). The data piracy includes the U.S. Department of Education (see its EdFacts Data Exchange and its Datapalooza conferences and its official student-data partnership with private groups such as the Council of Chief State School Officers and National Governors Association.) The data piracy party includes the U.S. Chamber of Commerce –and the United Nations. (See the U.N. Data Revolution) The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is in. (Just see how much money Gates gives to, and earns from, this movement.) The federal Commission on Evidence Based Policy, the Data Quality Campaign, American Institutes for Research, the United Nations’ Data Revolution Initiative, Pearson, Microsoft, and Jeb Bush’s Foundation are in. Betsy DeVos does nothing, nothing to stop it. Nothing.

Lest we believe that it’s all bad guys, far away, realize that the Goliaths of data piracy also includes locals: the Utah Data Alliance, Utah’s Prosperity 2020, The Utah Chamber of Commerce, the University of Utah’s K-12 research database (SLDS) and many Utah corporations.

These groups are financially thriving financially from the common use of Common Educational Data Standards (CEDS) and Common Core academic standards, which go hand in hand. They also thrive on the lack of proper protections over student data privacy, although many of them give loud and proud lip service to caring about student data privacy.

Hearing these groups claim commitment to student privacy (after having listened to the CEP‘s meetings, or after having seen what the USDOE did to shred protective FERPA law) is like hearing a boat captain boast about the safety of his vessel to passengers who have been handed sandwiches instead of life vests. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, look into the federal Commission on Evidence Based Policy (CEP) for starters.

It’s pretty fascinating, but inspiring at the same time, to see that some people are thinking through all of this: a group of smart, conservative Republicans and smart, progressive Democrats are joining forces because they see student data privacy being of extreme, non-negotiable importance. The non-bought, pro-privacy coalition, called The Parent Coalition for Student Privacy, has just released its Parent Toolkit for Student Privacy, which it calls “a practical guide for protecting your child’s sensitive school data from snoops, hackers, and marketers”.

I’m not anti-data or anti-progress. Invention and science are wonders! I balk at, and hope others will consider, the idea that personal privacy of children is being taken without their consent and without their parents’ consent, for cash.

The conspiracy of greed does not want to talk about that.

It just wants to keep collecting the golden eggs.

It’s up to individual parents to care and to act, to protect student data privacy. State school systems are not going to do it; they are taking huge grants from the feds, on an ongoing basis, to beef up the “robust data systems” instead.